To paint a glamorous woman, naked but for a loosely hung fur coat and a long drape of pearls, and have her not be the focal point of an image is just one of the striking aspects of Walton Ford’s new series of paintings, on view at Gagosian in New York through April 19. Based on the artist’s research into the Marchesa Luisa Casati, the paintings are far more interested in the experience of her feline companions: two dazzling cheetahs she reportedly paraded along the canals of Venice. One of the cats fiercely occupies the center of La levata del sole (2025), backlit by the rising sun. The other is poised in the midground, a pigeon snapped in its maw. Standing off to the side with a defiant pose and provocative gaze, Casati is alluring but hardly the painting’s most compelling feature.
Ford is well-known for his work appropriating—and subverting—the conventions of natural history illustrations. He has perfected an aesthetic of animal liveliness, one that trades in the genteel authority of 18th- and 19th-century science but smuggles in some contemporary humor and critique. Prints done in the style of famed ornithologist John James Audubon, for example, appear to replicate Audubon’s life-sized depictions of American birds. But Ford’s versions are often riven with barely suppressed psychological tension, channeling the violence behind Audubon’s representations. Audubon both loved his birds, rendering them with ardent vivacity, and ultimately killed them in pursuit of his image.
Walton Ford: Forse che si forse che no, 2024.
©Walton Ford. Photo Tom Powel. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Ford has found in the animal world a rich source of narrative ironies, with animals both mirroring human dramas and revealing the animality of human society. In these new works, he brings a human actor into the scene in more explicit ways. Casati was a Milanese heiress living large in early 20th-century Venice; she became involved with the Futurists and sought to make her life a work of art. In addition to the cheetahs, she allegedly wore snakes as necklaces and cultivated a menagerie of lion cubs, panthers, monkeys, peacocks, and other exotic species. Her wild parties and exuberant lifestyle, combined with the eternal beauty of Venice, provide captivating content for Ford’s images.
The paintings are themselves exquisite objects. Ford’s dexterity with watercolor balances trompe-l’oeil illusionism, particularly in the cheetah’s mesmerizing coats, with painterly abandon, as in the pooling reflections on the surface of the Grand Canal. Ford, the gallery reports, initially intended to make just one painting on the subject: the golden, glowing, La levata del sole (2025). But he was so taken with the result that he carried on, and one of the most rewarding parts of the show is seeing the characters develop across the series. Each work takes an Italian title, often referring to literature published by Casati’s lover, the military officer and decadent poet Gabriele D’Annunzio.
View of Walton Ford’s 2025 exhibition “Tutto” at Gagosian, New York.
Photo Owen Conway. Courtesy Gagosian.
Decadence, a literary and artistic movement that emerged in the 19th century and was popular in Casati’s time, dwelled in hedonism as an antidote to bourgeois mores, and the decadence here is truly ravishing. The cheetahs’ jeweled collars sparkle, the Marchesa’s lithe body shimmers in the moonlight. And then, like any good thing, there starts to be too much of it. The golden glow of La levata del sole becomes the sickly-sweet, bubble-gum pink of La Marchesa (2024). The latter work depicts the aftermath of a fête. Revelers in the background drape themselves among ruins, their bodies seemingly turned to stone. There may be some vanitas in this image, with scattered carnival masks and overturned wine jugs nodding at symbolic resonance. But the cheetahs, licking the leavings clean, seem unbothered by any metaphoric significance.
Across the paintings, it’s the animals who take the cake. In one of the most enigmatic works in the series, Casati—wrapped in a magnificent python—stands in the arched opening to a derelict alleyway while her companions scrounge discarded kitchen scraps. By the 1930s, Casati had lost her fortune, but Ford imagines a world in which she kept the cheetahs. Both have jewel-studded collars and diamond-encrusted leashes, though no one deigns to hold them. Titled Desiderio infinito (2025), the work throbs with desire: Casati’s, the cheetahs’, and our own, for these delicious paintings.